Cake
Cake is a form of bread or bread-like food. In its modern forms, it is typically a sweet baked dessert. In its oldest forms, cakes were normally fried breads or cheesecakes, and normally had a disk shape. Determining whether a given food should be classified as bread, cake, or pastry can be difficult. Modern cake, especially layer cakes, normally contain a combination of flour, sugar, eggs, and butter or oil, with some varieties also requiring liquid (typically milk or water) and leavening agents (such as yeast or baking powder). Flavorful ingredients like fruit purees, nuts, dried or candied fruit, or extracts are often added, and numerous substitutions for the primary ingredients are possible. Cakes are often filled with fruit preserves or dessert sauces (like pastry cream), iced with buttercream or other icings, and decorated with marzipan, piped borders or candied fruit.[1] Cake is often the dessert of choice for meals at ceremonial occasions, particularly weddings, anniversaries, and birthdays. There are countless cake recipes; some are bread-like, some rich and elaborate, and many are centuries old. Cake making is no longer a complicated procedure; while at one time considerable labor went into cake making (particularly the whisking of egg foams), baking equipment and directions have been simplified so that even the most amateur cook may bake a cake. Dessert is the usually sweet course that concludes a meal. The food that composes the dessert course includes but is not limited to sweet foods. There is a wide variety of desserts in western cultures now in
luding cakes, cookies, biscuits, gelatins, pastries, ice creams, pies, pudding, and candies. Fruit is also commonly found in dessert courses because of its natural sweetness. Many different cultures have their own variations of similar desserts around the world, such as in Russia, where many breakfast foods such as blint, oladi, and syrniki can be served with honey and jam to make them popular as desserts. The loosely defined course called dessert can apply to many foods.Candied fruit, also known as crystallized fruit or Glace fruit, has been around since the 14th century. Whole fruit, smaller pieces of fruit, or pieces of peel, are placed in heated sugar syrup, which absorbs the moisture from within the fruit and eventually preserves it. Depending on size and type of fruit, this process of preservation can take from several days to several months.[1] The continual process of drenching the fruit in syrup causes the fruit to become saturated with sugar, preventing the growth of spoilage microorganisms due to the unfavourable osmotic pressure this creates.[2] Fruits that are commonly candied include dates, cherries, pineapple, and ginger.[3] The principal candied peels are orange and citron; these with candied lemon peel are the usual ingredients of mixed chopped peel (which may also include glace cherries). The marron glace is among the most prized of candied confections. Recipes vary from region to region, but the general principle is to boil the fruit, steep it in increasingly strong sugar solutions for a number of weeks, and then dry off any remaining water.